


your teeth (or, you never stop mopping up the pain)

by fisherqueens



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M, Sibling Incest, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-28
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 02:41:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2212701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fisherqueens/pseuds/fisherqueens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>their parents die, jaz grows up too quickly, they lose fish faster than they can blink. there aren't any happy endings here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your teeth (or, you never stop mopping up the pain)

This is a story of love distorted.

-

He believes, when he lays in bed at night, that these sorts of things happen for a reason. Their parents die, Jaz grows up too quickly, they lose fish faster than they can blink.

Raleigh wants to be a hero.

Yancy just wants to take back the coast.

In the end it’s all the same and in the dark, he reaches a hand up outside his bunk just as Yancy is reaching a hand down and their fingers intertwine and for a brief five minutes, Raleigh allows himself to cry loudly. Yancy doesn’t move. But it doesn’t mean shit and Raleigh knows it. He just cries quietly.

-

Raleigh kisses him when they are young and it is all over. 

It is done on a whim and his heart is racing when their mouths make contact (Yancy’s lips are softer than he anticipated). 

With warm hands and warm limbs, long and foal-like and with Yancy dragging a clumsy mouth over his ear and cradling him from behind. There are fingers around his cock and he is pulling, yanking something desperate out of him with every long and drawn out sound. He remembers the feeling of cold sheets against the palms of his trembling hands and he remembers the peeling paint on the window sill and the kerosene lanterns used for fun and the creak of the old bed. 

He half wants to swear when he comes into his hand, feels something pricking at the corners of his eyelids when Yancy whispers, I'm sorry, oh fuck, I'm sorry--like he's done something wrong.

He wonders for twenty-eight days if he is the thing that has been done wrong.

If he is a bad decision.

A bad choice.

-

Wounded, they carry a tooth for one another in their pockets, but never speak a word.

Yancy kisses him goodnight, a hand on his pillow and Raleigh’s fist clutched into the fabric of his shirt right over his heart. 

The kiss lingers longer than it needs to.

-

It is April and the ice is melting and Raleigh and Yancy are skipping stones with Jaz. She is long and limber, tall in the throat with blonde hair, a Becket trademark. Their parents are dead and Raleigh and Yancy are on leave briefly. They come down to see her and they watch the orcas on Monday, make cookies on Tuesday, do the laundry for her and clean the house on Wednesday, and trek through the wilds today… Thursday. Jaz seems happy, and it’s the first time they’ve been able to spend time with her. 

"Ten," Raleigh calls as the stone lands with a soft and hollow noise into the lake. Yancy is palming a flat stone in large hands. He is seventeen and his stone shoots across the water with a well-worn flick of his wrist and Raleigh watches it. 

It’s dumb to relate to a stone as it sinks down to the bottom of the lake and settles, flat on the bed below. 

Jaz tosses her stone and it outskips Yancy’s. She wades into the cold water and for a brief moment Raleigh thinks about holding her hand. 

He reaches out.

She pulls away. 

-

The tech’s name is Joel and Raleigh thinks he might like him.

They sit for drinks at a small dive after practice.

He’s twenty-eight and Raleigh is seventeen.

“The world is coming to an end,” Joel says and even though Raleigh is underage, the bartender serves him anyways. Raleigh wonders why, but then shrugs it off. It’s Alaska. Fucking Alaska. He swings his legs on the barstool and nurses beer that tastes too tart for his liking (it should be smooth and dark and soft on the tongue, like liquid velvet. This stuff is acrid and harsh and bites back when instead it should submit to the palette.) 

“You think that?” Raleigh finally replies, rubbing a hand over the growing fuzz of his hair, two weeks grown in. Do you really think that the world is ending? Because if it is, well, Raleigh has some decisions to pare through and some people to kiss and someone to apologize too because Yancy, Yancy, Yancy bleeds through his mind and into his eyes, an image burned of scars and hot showers and hands on the slope of his waist. Yancy. Yancy. 

“I know so,” Joel says and drags a finger through the lazy drip of condensation along his glass. Raleigh wets his lips and gets the idea—it makes his cock jump. How could you not get it? He drinks a little faster. Even now, he’s ghosting and he can feel it throb in his palms, the way his arms throw themselves forward and back, come together. 

_You ready, kid?_

I was born ready.

_Kid?_

He’s ghosting and it makes his heart ache as he finishes his beer and another, even though he doesn’t like it, he does it anyways. We do all sorts of things that we hate. We do them because we have to and Raleigh needs to make everything in his head fucking shut the hell up before he throws himself over the bar. 

It’s a hand on his back and a dark car back to Joel’s apartment close to the base. 

He throws him against the door and Joel throws him back into the bathroom where they fuck sprawled in the bathtub and the tile is cold and wet against Raleigh’s back. He hits his head on the faucet but doesn’t care because Joel has his knee in one hand and his heel in the other and he’s yanking Raleigh’s pants off. His skin hits the cold tile and he whines until warm palms cradle his hips, lift him up with a soft awed sound. He wants to wrap his legs around him as he goes down, licks up the length of him and down again, wants to choke the air out of him because all he can think of is Yancy (and it takes every ounce of his self-awareness not to whisper his name in the cold starlight that floods from a small porthole window). Joel is pressing in with an unprepared slow burn that makes him jump and croon at the same time all of a sudden, too quickly, too impatiently, but he’ll take it. It aches, a dull heartbeat, the way you settle inside someone else and virtually become a part of them.

“Steady, kid, steady—”

He opens his mouth and feels the dangerous curve of his tongue start, but never finish, bringing his teeth together instead.

“Beautiful—you’re doing beautifully—”

And Raleigh decides that he doesn’t want to be beautiful when a hand slides down his stomach and up to softly thumb his collarbone and fingers wrap around his throat and press. 

-

It’s a provocation when they drift again the following Thursday in a routine check-up of Gipsy. Raleigh closes his eyes and feels Yancy press in from all sides. He’s a warmth wrapped around him, the balmy summer packed in tight with tire swings and melting snow and wolves in thin summer coats bounding through the trickling, cold water. I missed you—Yancy, Yancy— It’s the only thing that runs through his mind. 

Everything goes red and Gipsy’s elbow rocket engages and suddenly Yancy is pulling out, out, out and everything feels like a knife wound being pressed into the pit of his stomach.

-

Yancy grabs him by the sides of his head and slams him so hard against the wall that his head is spinning and he chips a tooth in the back of his mouth, tastes the blood as it cuts into his tongue. His mouth is parted and Yancy cries into it softly. I missed you, I missed you, I missed you, and Raleigh curls his tongue against the roof of his mouth and catches the folds and pockets of his jacket and pulls him up closer. I thought you hated me, Yancy says as he pulls back and mouths at his pulse. He says it but he doesn’t, it’s painted on his face in fingerprints and kisses and twisted brows and mouth that makes him look nearly ugly.

He drinks him in slowly, tilts his mouth like a cup and cradles the back of his head now as he kisses him, full-bodied and hungry. It makes his entire body curl, toes to fingers and he whines into his mouth over and over again. 

"I thought you hated me," Raleigh replies and tips his head back as fingers cradles the softness of his nape and they press and fondle softly. Yancy cups him between his legs and for a moment Raleigh thinks it better than everything else. Than fucking in a bathtub or in the back of a pick-up truck or "I thought you--"

"Kid," Yancy breathes and bites down.

It is a hurricane that builds in Raleigh's lungs as he shoves back, pushes Yancy forward and forward, feels his feet give way and lands them both square on a bunk atop one another.

-

Raleigh wants to ask him what they’re going to do about it.

“About what?” Yancy says.

The clock whispers two o’clock in the morning, blinking bright red on the small kitchenette. Raleigh shifts and his feet are cold. He tucks them further under the blanket, presses them to Yancy’s calves in a bid to get warm. 

He says there’s nothing to talk about.

He says to go to sleep.

-

It goes on for a year. 

-

It falls apart. It gets put back together. It falls apart again. They bite and claw and tear one another apart, like teeth into old, dead skin, peeling away layer by layer until they get to the bone. Even then, that is not enough and they bite and crack until they reach the marrow. They say it is selfish aloud, but they know that they do it for each other. Raleigh has a mouthful of blood and Yancy feels his knuckles all swollen and bruised. They don’t apologize, they just sit there in the dark. 

Yancy crawls to the fridge and drinks the last dregs of orange juice. 

Raleigh pulls a pillow down and lays his head on the floor and suddenly he feels very small and unfit to sit in the cradle of a Jaeger. He wants Jaz and he wants Yancy and he wants ten dogs and five fish and wide open spaces, not something made of metal caging him in. The room is too small, too narrow and it’s hard to breathe, but he manages. 

“Hey…” Yancy says and he looks up briefly. He knows his eyes are swollen and he can’t really care. 

“What.”

Yancy lays his head down on the pillow beside him. 

He doesn’t tell him it’s going to be alright.

-

A year later and Raleigh is hearing the beat of Yancy’s heart stop mind-sentence. 

“Listen to me—”

What.

What.

Yancy. Yancy. Yancy.

It’s like he’s been carved out, hollowed, and everything feels like—

Yancy. Yancy. Yancy

-

I fucking hate it when you lie to me, Raleigh says through his teeth and a mouthful of blood. Everything is overloading. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Raleigh doesn’t know where he is or what he’s supposed to do but he keeps plowing through water and ice floes. I need… I need… I need.

We’ll go down together, kiddo. Together.

-

In his dreams, Yancy’s face is two hairs away from his own and his eyes are too bright.

“You want the truth?” Yancy starts in like a bad movie, and Raleigh clamps his hands over his mouth.

_You can’t handle the truth._

-

Five years later and Raleigh has run and run and run until his legs have tired him out. He is now standing still while the world rushes by him in a flurry of walls and Jaegers and resistance to the Man above. He likes it, he likes the way things are here in such a small and too-warm space in Hong Kong. He breathes easier than he has in months. He likes the languages that flood his ears—Russian, Chinese, Japanese, a bit of French, German when the research department is shrieking over who is right and who is wrong.

For once in a long time, he feels… he feels okay.

-

The world is ending around them and Raleigh sits with Mako Mori on the scaffolding in engineering, beating his mashed potatoes into his half-frozen ravioli trying to warm it up.

Mako doesn’t talk about it. She understands. Raleigh likes that she understands. Or maybe she doesn’t understand, but doesn’t care. 

He likes that. They are both used and blank. Paper with eraser streaks. Never completely clean. There is something that lingers there in streams of neural impulses and ghostly touches at night, in eyes and peepholes and the way they come together where she quietly tugs at a loose thread on his sweater. 

-

I will never lie to you, she says to him one day. 

Raleigh smiles ruefully.

“Thanks.”

-

The worst part is, she means it.


End file.
